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“Out with the old, in with the new,” the saying goes. “Out with the old, kicking and screaming like little children,” would be more accurate.

If you haven't had to hail a cab recently, you may not have heard of the San Francisco-based tech startup Uber. But if you witnessed the massive traffic snarl caused by protesting cab drivers in London's Trafalgar Square, you probably have at least some idea what's going on.

Uber (and it's competitors, Lyft and Sidecar) are app companies that have developed an alternative to the taxi. It pairs drivers and ride-seekers with each other, bypassing the cab companies altogether. Naturally, the cab companies are not too pleased with this.

If you're trying to build your own disruptive company, there's a good lesson to learn here. Uber and the app ride-sharing industry could shatter taxi cartels worldwide.

The first step? They use a much more nimble approach that what ride-seekers are forced to endure right now. For example, let's take a look at what it takes to become a cab driver in London.

In London, the tradition of licensed cabs goes back at least 300 years to “hackney carriages.” The application process is managed by local licensing offices and is quite extensive. There's a written test, an oral test, and an exhaustive vehicle inspection. Applicants are expected to know London's myriad of streets and alleyways by memory—a feat that usually requires between 2 to 4 years of study, roughly equivalent to the time you'd spend on an associate's degree—and rattle off the shortest route between any two points in the city at the prompting of the test administrator.

Add to that the price of the vehicle, the myriad licensing and test fees, paying to have a meter installed, the criminal background checks . . . becoming a cab driver in London is a huge investment of both time and money. Whoever coined the phrase “barriers to entry” was probably a London cabbie.

Guess who ends up footing the bill for all of that? We do!

Not to mention that nearly every city in the world maintains an artificial scarcity of cabs by limiting the number of licenses that they award. The result is inflated prices and unsatisfactory service—a classic market weakness, waiting to be exploited.

Compare the challenges in London to how easy it is to become an Uber driver: all you need is a car, license, insurance, and a background check. Same with Uber's arch-nemesis Lyft—it all works through the app. There's no central dispatch or motor pool.

It's so easy, in fact, that many drivers drive for both companies. Tales abound of drivers juggling cell phones, picking up fares from both companies while offering bids on Sidecar, the third main ride-sharing competitor who uses a bidding system instead of fixed rates.

You can see why the taxi drivers are peeved. It's a perfect example of a skilled trade being made irrelevant by technological progress. And because it's “ride sharing,” regulators are still playing catch-up.

Speaking of regulators . . . the very regulatory bodies that were set up to protect consumers are now doing them a disservice in most of the cities that Uber operates in. Bitter fights in cities such as San Francisco about whether or not Uber and Lyft can pick up or drop off at the airport has led to citizen's arrests and long streams of sharply-worded letters.

In the end, Uber will likely prevail.

The real lesson here is about the nature of disruptor companies. If you want to really, truly upend the market, then you have to focus on perfecting the tools people use to create change. In the end, companies don't upend markets—customers do. And now customers are carrying the internet in their pockets wherever they go.

That's a lesson that Uber understands. If Uber fighting alone against the inertia of city governments and lobbying power of taxi cartels, they would have no chance of success. At 900 employees, they're not big enough, even with a reported value in the billions of dollars.